Comment by ben_w

> but I'm also a developer with decades of experience, so I'm not gonna claim it'll help non-programmers to build software, or whatever. They're tools, not solutions in themselves.

Also with decades experience, I'd say that it depends how big the non-programmer is dreaming:

To agree with you: A well-meaning friend sent an entrepreneur my direction, whose idea was "Uber for aircraft". I tried to figure out exactly what they meant, ending the conversation when I realised all answers were rephrasing of that vague three words pitch, that they didn't really know what they wanted to do in any specific enumerable sense.

LLMs can't solve the problem when even the person asking doesn't know what they want.

But on the other end the scale, I've been asked to give an estimate for an app which, in its entirety, would've been one day's work even with the QA and acceptance testing and going through the Apple App Store upload process. Like, I kept asking if there was any other hidden complexity, and nope, the entire pitch was what you'd give as a pre-interview code-challenge.

An LLM would've spat out the solution to that in less time than I spent with the people who'd asked me to estimate it.